AP Photo/David Goldman
Even before St. Louis prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch‘s announcement Monday that police officer Darren Wilson would not be charged for shooting Michael Brown, the U.S. case had attracted huge international interest.
With mounting protests in Brown’s hometown of Ferguson, and with demonstrations spreading to other parts of the U.S., the Michael Brown case led many news broadcasts around the world and has taken up significant newspaper copy.
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Leading 24-hour news channels from around the world have broken into their regular programming to follow events live from Ferguson with reporters on the ground. The U.K.’s BBC News 24, Sky News, ITN and Channel 4, China’s CCTV, France’s France 24, RT from Russia and Al Jazeera from Qatar, among many, many others, have deployed teams to report from the protests.
Fires, looting & tear gas in #Ferguson after #MichaelBrown ruling http://t.co/SKQ2KulIoO pic.twitter.com/vr8wyHJcLQ
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) November 25, 2014
Building on fire in #Ferguson LIVE UPDATES: http://t.co/02xcC6EptD pic.twitter.com/59XKNNmFYl
— RT (@RT_com) November 25, 2014
In addition to reporting of the news, opinion columns have begun to hit many of the morning editions of newspapers around the world. In The Guardian, Syreeta McFadden wrote an impassioned column that blasted the decision not to indict Wilson, but also outlined her frustrations. “A non-indictment is no absolution of guilt, but are you not angry?” she wrote. “Are you not sick of being unsurprised?”
Outside of the U.K., European papers, in general, took the side of protesters in Ferguson, condemning the violence while sympathizing with the outrage behind it. “It’s not right!” ran the headline in Germany’s paper of record Die Zeit, with journalist Sebastian Moll quoting Brown family lawyer Benjamin Crump‘s response to the grand jury decision on Monday.
Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Patrick Bahners chose a more biblical reference, entitling his piece “the sweet grapes of wrath” over a picture of burning cars on the streets of Ferguson.
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Johannes Kuhn, writing for the Munich-based Sueddeutsche Zeitung, noted that “if this turns out to be one of the most bitter nights in American history, then (St. Louis County prosecutor) Robert McCulloch will have a special place in it.”
In France, Ferguson coverage dominated the website of newspaper Le Monde, with the paper taking a look at the local impact, as well as zooming out to countrywide protests.
The Times of India was unequivocal in seeing this case through a racial lens, leading with the headline “Ferguson shooting: US erupts in black anger over clean chit to white cop.”
Al Jazeera’s website carried an op-ed from Hatem Bazian, who argued that “justice for African-Americans will remain an illusion as long as America fails to account for racism.”
